I don’t know about you, but I spend too much time waiting for the Camera app shutter to open so I can take a photo with my iPhone. The problem with that, of course, is that I miss a lot of shots that way, even when I’m using the lock-screen camera swipe.
Luckily, there’s a simple way to make things move a lot faster when trying to take a quick action shot with your iPhone.
While this tip may be moot once iOS 6 happens, it’s still available to you right now.
When you’re in a big city trying to drive somewhere, the route you may choose will vary depending on traffic conditions. There are a ton of third-party apps out there that can help figure out traffic, but why not just use one that’s already on your iPhone? Maps will do the job, and all it takes is a little tap.
YouTube is synonymous with online video. As such, it’s a great resource to find music by your favorite artists, instructional videos, and even video podcasts. You may, however, have noticed that when you press the Home button, the app quits and you are no longer able to watch or listen to the video playing in the background.
Actually, that’s wrong. You *can* in fact listen to a YouTube video in the background, with a fairly neat workaround, brought to you by a frequent reader of Cult of Mac.
Here’s another one of those quirky, brilliant hidden features of the iPhone’s operating system. I’m sure you’ve all muted a phone call while on the line with someone, right? What about when you’re on speaker phone? Mute makes sure that the other person can’t hear you, but you certainly can still hear them. That can be frustrating, especially when in a room with other folks, like during an interview.
Sometimes it’s just good to mute both sides of the conversation, right? Hold is the way your iPhone can do that.
For someone who uses their iPhone a lot (and I mean a LOT), it’s funny how many little things I just don’t know about. iOS is a brilliant and complex thing, and finding all the hidden features is pretty tricky. Take today’s tip, for example – I rarely use my iPhone as a phone, really, so it’s with that in mind that I want to point out how easy it actually is to create a conference call with Apple’s magical device.
We all have that contact or three that just can’t seem to take a hint. They keep calling and calling, and we really just need to get our work done. If you use the audible ringer on your iPhone, there’s a way to ignore that caller (along with any other folks you’d like to selectively mute) with a silent ringtone.
I’m not that fickle in the rest of my life, honest. When it comes to news reading apps on the iPad, however, I’ve had many loves. First came Flipboard, which grabbed my attention with its well-designed layouts of web links and images shared by people in my social network circles.
Then I found Trapit, which added both AI and editorial curation to my newsreader, though it is a bit lacking in the design department.
Now, there’s News360 for iPad, and I think I’ve fallen in love. Again.
These days, most of us are caught in an odd transition from paper to digital documents. Most of us create documents on our Macs, but also need to deal with a ton of actual dead-tree paperwork on a daily basis.
There are a bunch of optical character recognition (OCR) apps out there for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad of varying quality and interface design. Quick Reader is one of the less expensive ones, at $0.99, so might be worth a try if your budget is tight.
Reader James G writes,
I use the iPad’s locking feature requiring a 4-digit pin. The problem I was worried about is that the default setting has a button allowing you to see photos without knowing the 4-digit pin.
With the dozens of login names & passwords I’m required to remember, I often take a screenshot whenever I’ve created a new login or changed my password. So some of my “photos” are part of what I want to protect. Until recently I hadn’t realized that by default the pin didn’t block looking at the pictures.
I had looked and not found a way to turn that off, but after writing to you discovered there is a way to do it.
So, as James found out, there is, in fact, a way to keep your photos private when using the passcode security on an iPad, but you have to disable the default slideshow option first.
Here’s another one of those “so simple it hurts” tips that we find from time to time, leaving us scratching our heads, wondering why we didn’t figure it out sooner.
When you’re browsing the web, whether you’re on a computer or your iPhone, you don’t always want to open links in the window you’re browsing in. Neither do you always want to open them in a new tab in the foreground. Sometimes, especially when you’re doing internet research, you want to open tabs in the background. On the Mac, it’s simply a matter of Command clicking a link in your current browser, or setting a preference or two for your favorite web apps.
You can do this on iOS, too, with a simple tap in Settings. Here’s how.
iPhone and iPad video recording is fast becoming a standard way of sharing the view of our world these days. With the new HD video options in the iPhone 4S and the new iPad, of course, the videos are getting even larger. What’s a budding videographer supposed to do with these huge files when sending them to our friends and family?
Turns out, you can trim the videos down right on your iOS device using the Trim feature. Here’s how.
Finding stuff on the web is pretty easy. Finding stuff you don’t already know about, surprising stuff, is hard. That’s what the developers behind Trapit are trying to fix.
Trapit for iPad allows you to discover things you’re already interested in as well as stuff you may not even know you’re looking for using algorithms that run in the app behind the scenes. What that means is that once you start using Trapit, it will learn what you’re into, and start finding stuff that might be of interest to you, based on what you’re already checking out as well as new stuff that might be cool for you to see.
The app also curates its own content into a Featured Traps section, which will help you discover even more content for that surprise factor.
It sure is great to be able to see the first few lines of emails as they come in on the iPhone, but it’s equally helpful to see more subject headers on the screen at one time. The more emails I can see at once, the more I can ignore, focusing more closely on emails that look promising.
iOS allows you to change the number of emails up on the screen at one time with a simple trip to the Settings app on your iPhone and iPod touch. It’ll even work on your iPad, but that may not be as important as it is on a much smaller screen.
There are a few of us iPad users that may have gone a little bit crazy with the Newsstand app when it first came out. We thought it would be super cool to read ALL of our magazines on the iPad, especially when we travel – what better way to avoid paying the per-issue price in the airport magazine stand when we could have the latest issues of our favorite rags all loaded up on our magical iPad? Sounds great, right?
And then we got on the plane, and realized that we still had to turn off all electronic devices before take off, and wait till about 10,000 feet before we could read them. What a bummer. Then, when we tried to figure out how to unsubscribe from the darn things, we realized we were at a loss. We tried going back into the iTunes App store app description, we messed around in Newsstand, all to no avail.
Here’s how to do it, though, with little to no hassle.
Many folks add events to their Calendar app on their iOS device the same way they’ve added events on paper since the way back days before smartphones and personal information managers. They flip to the date they want to add an event to, tap on the day, and then add it there.
This works, yes, but it can get tedious, with all the arrow tapping. What if your event is a couple years out? Even in month mode, tapping through 24 months is bound to get tedious.
There is, of course, an easier way.
Here in the US, if you’re in the military or work in aviation, you might actually use what most of the rest of the world thinks of as standard, 24-hour time. While it will confuse all your US-living friends and relatives when they ask for the time and you show them your iOS device’s lock screen, that’s their issue, right? You, at least, will have the joy of knowing that you are fully prepared for the type of time tracking that most people around the globe use.
The default iOS clock in the US is a 12-hour clock, with AM and PM appended to the numbers to denote morning or evening. The other, more standard way of representing the time is with the 24-hour clock, in which any time after 12:00 is the logical 13:00, 14:00, and so on. It’s really easy to set on your iPhone or other iOS device.
It’s back to school time, of course, and that means textbooks for a large portion of students in higher ed, at least. And textbooks cost a lot. Like, a LOT.
The folks at TextbookLand aim to change that fact with their new iPhone app, TextbookMe. With it, you can search, scan a barcode, or browse your way to less expensive textbooks as you wander the quad looking for cute people to connect with at the party later in the evening. Or, so we hear.
As we mentioned in yesterday’s tip, sometimes you need to just clear out some space from your iPhone or iPad to make room for new photos as they come in, whether you’re taking them on the device itself or using PhotoStream. As one commenter mentioned yesterday, all these different sources of photos tend to make the number of them add up.
But what if you just want to dump a bunch of photos at once, say, while you’re away from the computer? Turns out, it’s just as easy as pie. Or cake. Whatever.
Photos take up a lot of space on our iOS devices. It’s important to many of us with the lower end iPhones to leave enough room on the device to capture new photos, let alone apps and music and books.
With the advent of Photostream, it’s easy to have the photos we take on our iPhone show up on our Macs or iPads, so deleting them from the iPhone makes a lot of sense and is much less of a scary proposition. Here’s how.
Don’t you hate it when you start to download a song file, or a podcast, or an app and it just sits there, mocking you? When the little progress bar just refuses to move, no matter how you scream at the front of your magical iOS device? Yeah, me, too.
One way to fix this problem with apps is to tap the icon to stop the download, and then tap it again to resume the download. If that doesn’t work (and it won’t with a media download), then you’re not out of luck. There is another way.
I use several different Macs during a given day, from a trusty Macbook Air to my Mac Mini to an iMac at my office job. I also use an iPhone and an iPad for various personal and business activities. It helps to have access to all the documents I need to deal with during a given day, regardless of what device I’m using, or what environment I’m in.
iCloud is a great idea, and OS X Mountain Lion and iOS 6 will continue to take the service forward. Today, however, I’d like to show you how I use two similar products to achieve a seamless document experience on my iOS devices. For me, Dropbox and Google Drive represent the best in class iOS apps to interface with my documents for home and work.
iOS has a lot of great features, some of which are focused on preserving as much battery life as possible. One of them is the Auto-Lock feature, which defaults to dimming the screen of your iOS device after a really short period of time.
This obviously helps preserve battery life, as the less the screen is on at full brightness, the longer you’ll be able to use it on a single charge. If you’d like to control this, though, and even turn it off fully, it’s a simple trip into the Settings App.
The reason the software keyboard works so well in iOS has a lot to do with Autocorrect and its pretty spot-on ability to figure out what the heck we’re typing. Most of the time, anyway, as various parody sites on the internet will attest to.
Autocorrect also learns the words you use more frequently, and adds them to a list in the background, letting you use oddly spelled terminology more easily. Sometimes, though, this functionality can backfire, as you end up adding words and phrases you really don’t want to have things autocorrect to.
Luckily, there’s an easy fix for this one.
For the most part, clicking on a youtube video in mobile Safari or Chrome will bring up the YouTube app on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. There are a few reasons why you might not want that to happen, one being that the YouTube app isn’t quite as full featured as the current mobile YouTube site itself, another being the waste of time of switching back and forth between the YouTube app and whatever mobile app you found the link in.
Forcing your iPhone to stay in the app you clicked the YouTube link in is as easy as it is non-intuitive. Here’s how to make it happen.
Taking notes and managing tasks can be a full time job. For many of us, the competing worlds of work, home, school, and hobbies can threaten to overwhelm all but the most organized among us. Unfortunately, not many of us (myself included) have the time or mental energy to create a system from scratch, forcing us to rely on software designers’ ideas about task management. There are a ton of apps out there to manage notes and tasks, but none that do it quite like Projectbook, an iPad-only iOS app available in the App Store now for $1.99.